Though Patrick didn’t like getting wrecked — and showed her displeasure with a bit of finger-pointing at Smith — she likes short-track racing and even enjoys a bit of bumping and banging.

“I don’t mind some beating and banging out there, I don’t mind pushing your way around a little bit,” Patrick said Friday. “It just happens. I did it a little bit at Phoenix even. It is just the nature of short tracks when you are running really close to one another.”

Patrick got her first taste of physical short-track racing at Bristol last August. She was running in the top 20 when Smith got into her, sending her spinning and crashing down the frontstretch and spoiling what was shaping up as a good run.

She didn’t experience such contact while racing in the open-wheel IndyCar Series and says she doesn’t mind a little roughhousing on the track.

“I enjoy it. I’ve always said from the beginning that NASCAR is a lot of fun for me because if somebody lays on you, you can lay right back,” Patrick said. “You aren’t risking your life, like the old days in IndyCar when somebody would do something that was not intelligent to you. I understood that it was a physical risk to try and get them back, because when the wheels are exposed, bad things happen.

“Not here, though. Not in NASCAR. You can bump and bang all you like.”

After a history-making eighth-place finish in the Daytona 500, Patrick has struggled the past two weeks, crashing at Phoenix and then getting lapped six times in a miserable 33rd-place finish at Las Vegas.

Patrick said her Stewart-Haas Racing team discovered some things this week that it did wrong with NASCAR’s new car at Las Vegas.

“It was definitely a struggle last week in Vegas. It was very, very loose. To be honest, it was loose at Phoenix as well,” she said. “There were a few things that we did; a few common denominators in the weekends. I feel like we came away, given the fact that it was so challenging, (with some things) that we really need to figure it out.

“I went into the shop on Tuesday and there was definitely some thoughts and concepts that they were like, ‘Look, we did this wrong; we need to fix that; your comments made sense from practice, it didn’t even make sense to me that we needed to do them necessarily for the race.’”

Like many teams, Patrick’s Tony Gibson-led crew is still trying to figure out the aerodynamics of NASCAR’s new Gen-6 car.

“I think that this car works a little differently in traffic,” said Patrick, who ran only 10 races with the old Cup car last year. “Aerodynamically, we have lost a lot of side-force, and I think that plays a role. I think that we have to get all four tires on the ground the way they need to be. We have to get the rear tied down. There’s nothing you can do if you can’t put the power down.”

Patrick hopes for much better results at Bristol, where she knows staying out of trouble and out of the wall will be key. Doing that, though, might be easier said than done.

“You know, when we are racing nose-to-tail really close, it’s always more of a risk,” she said. “There is nothing I can do to prepare myself better for the race that would fix the problem from last time of getting taken out. If you get taken out, you get taken out. Hopefully that doesn’t happen.

“The best thing I can do for that is try and get further up the field so that it is around some smarter drivers. Hopefully that happens.”